I'll been in the country less than 24 hours, and already broken the rule against drinking local water.
Arrived in Ecuador last night! The flight from Miami to Quito was nothing unique, but certainly nicer than any flight I've had on an American airline. Customs was straight forward as well, then I got to meet my host family! I was met at the Airport by Natacha and Antonio Pernas, my host mum & dad, and we got to know each other as we waited for Hannah, the Aussie who is the other student living from the GAIAS program I'm living with here in Quito. Natacha & Antonio don't speak any English, but conversing in Spanish with them certainly went better than I thought it would. My linguistic skills weren't great, but we got our points across!
After we got Hannah, we drove to Cumbaya, the suburb of Quito where the Pernas' live. The drive wasn't bad at all, and as we neared their house they pointed out that the University de San Francisco de Quito, aka where I'll take my first couple classes before I go to the Galapagos, is only a 10 minute walk away. The house is in a private neighborhood, un barrio, with the house itself behind a wall and surrounded by a small garden on 3 sides. Inside I met the 2 Pernas kids living at home- Jose Antonio, a civil engineer in Quito, and Claudia, a law student in her last year at USFQ. After a brief dinner, Antonio & Natacha turned in, and us youngins' well out for a few drinks at the Turtle Head Cumbaya, a British-style bar near the University. The bar was fun, though a little bit on the loud side, especially after a band started playing, doing a lot of covers of bands like Led Zeppelin and The Beatles. In keeping with the Latin American stereotype of being soccer obsessed, we played a bit of futbolino, fuisball, before we turned in for the night. The drinking was definitely geared towards sociality- instead of individually ordering drinks, we got a bottle of gin, a pitcher of water, bucket of ice, and a smidge of lemon juice to make simple mixed drinks.
This morning, Jose Antonio, Claudia, one of their mates & I went in for a bike ride while Hannah slept off her cross-Pacific flights. The trail we rode was a couple of km from the house in Cumbaya, and followed the path of an old railroad from the early 1900s. The first little bit went though the city, passing though neighborhoods and showing economic contrast that is Ecuador- There'd be a couple big, gorgeous houses with red tile roofs and painted walls, and beside them would be rundown houses for los pobres, made of bare cinder block with plain windows, flat cement roofs, and stray dogs laying in the dirt drives. The second, and superior, part of the ride traveled on both sides of a massive canyon formed by the Rio Chichi. Stupidly, I didn't bring my camera with me by here's another blog with pictures, but the walls of the canyon were dry earth coated in scrappy plants, with larger plants and pines on the ridge line and by the river. The trail slowly worked down the decline of one bank of the canyon before crossing Rio Chichi on a small stone bridge and slowly climbing up the opposite bank. The far bank had a couple of old railway tunnels- some short enough to see the far end, but the longest one pitch black inside except for a couple holes in the side to view the outside and let light in. Honestly, the light just make the following darkness even harder to see though. The whole day was overcast, and it began to sprinkle as we loaded our bikes back into the pickup!
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